Signs of ‘feeding’ ritual at dingo burial site shed new light on bond between First Nations people and canines

Signs of ‘feeding’ ritual at dingo burial site shed new light on bond between First Nations people and canines

The discovery of a millennium-old dingo burial site in western New South Wales, including evidence of a “feeding” ritual never before documented archaeologically, has shed new light on the longstanding relationship between the canines and First Nations people.

The dingo was buried along the Baaka, or Darling River, in Kinchega national park near the Menindee Lakes.

Radiocarbon dating suggests the animal was buried between 916 and 963 years ago in a midden, which the Barkindji people tended to by adding river mussel shells for about 500 years afterwards.

Scientists say the practice of “feeding” the site with shells had never been observed archaeologically anywhere in the world before.

“Barkindji Elders propose that ongoing additions to the Kinchega midden may have formed a ‘feeding’ ritual … which was maintained over multiple generations,” the researchers write in a study published in Australian Archaeology.

The project’s lead, Dr Amy Way, an archaeologist at the Australian Museum and lecturer at the University of Sydney, said that while Aboriginal dingo burial sites had previously been discovered, they had not been analysed in context.

“What was really significant in this work is that we showed that the midden was created at the time of burial, so these two processes happened together as a way of interring the dingo … into that landscape.”

The dingo, a male that lived an estimated four to seven years old, had “broken ribs and a broken leg, which are very typical injuries from hunting with kangaroos”, Way said. “That it had lived through these injuries and been nursed back to health, it just tells you how much the community at the time cared for that animal.”

The burial was first identified in 2000 by Barkindji elder Uncle Badger Bates and a National Parks and Wildlife Service archaeologist, after the site was exposed by roadworks. A salvage excavation was conducted in September 2023 to recover the dingo’s remains, after its skull was lost to floods in 2021.

David Doyle, a Barkindji custodian involved in the excavation, described the practice of continuously adding to the shell midden as “a way of keeping connection and also respecting the ancestors”.

Dingoes “were a companion animal right up until colonisation”, Doyle said. “Now, we actually don’t even have any on country here; they were hunted to regional extinction.

“Some of our Barkindji people still carry dingo as their totem. Even though we don’t have it in our region now, it’s still significant.”

Though Indigenous dingo burial sites have been previously documented, the research, funded by the Australian Museum Foundation, showed the practice extended further north and west along the Baaka system than previously documented.

Dr Kylie Cairns, a conservation biologist at the University of New South Wales who was not involved in the research, said the excavation showed “how some dingoes were really important to First Nations people and included in their daily life and kept as companions”.

The vast majority of dingoes lived in the wild, she said. “Dingoes are really important ecologically and culturally in Australia, and I think that at the moment, the way that dingoes are treated in legislation and on [the] ground … doesn’t reflect that.

“Something that a lot of Australians don’t realise is that we’re actively killing dingoes in national parks.

“We really need to have a discussion … about how we’re managing dingoes in the landscape, how we can make sure that we’re protecting livestock, but also valuing them for their cultural value and also for their ecological value,” she said.

Her research showed in 2023 that more than half of Australia’s dingoes were genetically pure, while a separate study, published this week, showed there are eight genetically distinct dingo populations.